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Pope Leo XIV was expected to celebrate an open-air Mass on Sunday morning inside the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, the centrepiece of the closing leg of a four-day papal visit to France — the first official state visit by a pope to the country in nearly two decades. France 24 is tracking the ceremony, the pontiff's movements and the wider reaction in a liveblog compiled with reporting from the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
The schedule for the day was published shortly before the celebrations began. A photograph distributed by AP, credited to photographer Laurent Cipriani, shows a priest arriving for the service at the sanctuary on the morning of September 27, 2026 — an indication that liturgical preparations were already under way as pilgrims and press gathered at the Marian shrine.
Lourdes is by some distance the most consequential stop of the tour. The Pyrenean town, one of the most heavily visited Catholic pilgrim centres in the world, draws millions of faithful every year, and a papal Mass on its esplanade carries a level of ceremonial and political weight that goes far beyond a routine visit. The sanctuary has become an emblem of French Catholicism itself, a site of healing and of public devotion, which makes it a natural place for a pope seeking to speak to a nation where the church's place in public life has been intensely contested.
The visit follows a busy opening in the capital. Earlier French coverage recorded a youth vigil at a Paris stadium to open the French leg of the tour, followed the next day by a large open-air Mass in central Paris attended by what France 24 reported as some 800,000 people, and a further Mass during which the pope prayed for France. The Lourdes gathering on Sunday therefore concludes a trip that has already blended large public rituals with smaller, more symbolic moments.
Timing on the fourth day is deliberately split in two. The morning is given over to the open-air Mass and the life of the sanctuary, while the afternoon is reserved for a private meeting with victims of clerical sexual abuse. That scheduling choice underlines the seriousness the pontiff attaches to the abuse crisis: the same day that carries the pageantry of an enormous crowd is also used for a meeting without cameras, where survivors are expected to speak directly to him.
France has been at the centre of the church's reckoning on sexual abuse for years. Successive waves of disclosures by victims, followed by investigations into church archives and by criminal proceedings, have forced a reckoning with institutional accountability, and pressure has mounted for the hierarchy to respond in ways that go beyond statements of regret. A private audience with survivors, granted at the end of a high-profile visit, is read by observers as a gesture of recognition that is difficult to dismiss even by sceptics.
The Lourdes leg also lands against a more difficult background within the church. France 24's analysis accompanying the tour has highlighted a schism with a "ultra-conservative rebel sect" — the breakaway traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X — and the way it has cast a pall over the visit. That tension, a recurring fault line in the wider Catholic world, is likely to be watched closely by people both inside and outside the church as a marker of how far the pope's approach to internal dissent has travelled.
Traditionalist disputes of this kind often surface most visibly around questions of liturgical practice and discipline, and any comments made at Lourdes from the platform or during the press pool could be weighed against the question of how firmly the pope intends to hold the line. The presence of a large, traditional and demonstratively devout crowd in Lourdes complicates any straightforward reading, since the same audience that celebrates papal closeness is also the constituency most attached to the older forms the reformist agenda targets.
Attention is shared with a crowded international agenda. Alongside the papal tour, France 24's front pages are carrying the rejection by Washington of an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a rival seven-day offer from Tehran, and a sharp rise in Argentina's poverty rate under President Milei, alongside coverage of deadly flooding in Nepal and the seasonal heatwave. Against that backdrop, the Lourdes Mass is likely to draw sustained international coverage precisely because of its scale and its symbolism rather than because of a new doctrinal initiative.
For the papacy, a successful visit to Lourdes is worth something even without policy announcements. Demonstrating that the pope can command a vast gathering in a country where organised secularism is strong, and doing so at a shrine rather than a national capital, sends a message about reach and religious belonging. It also offers a moment of diplomatic normalisation: a visit of this kind has not taken place in 18 years, and the interval alone gives the trip an air of historic occasion.
Practical questions are also part of the day. Large open-air liturgies in late September require considerable contingency planning around weather, crowd flow, transport to the town centre and the security of a gathering of that magnitude. Observers will be watching the size and composition of the crowd for indications of how the visit is received beyond the world's capitals.
For now, the immediate focus remains on the sanctuary itself. The Mass is expected to be the visible high point of the French tour, with the private afternoon meeting with abuse survivors the more sombre one. Readers seeking the latest developments as they happen are directed to the France 24 liveblog, which is being updated through the day with contributions from AP, AFP and Reuters.
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